What will the world be like in 2025? How will the kitchen of the future adapt to that world? Those are the questions that Ikea's Concept Kitchen 2025 hopes to answer. Developed in collaboration with design firm IDEO London and students from Lund and Eindhoven universities, the Concept Kitchen is designed to make people more creative about food while nudging them toward a more eco-friendly lifestyle.

Concept Kitchen 2025 is a student project based upon a list of assumptions about the world ten years from now. The students were posited a world of dwindling resources with much less energy available than today, and an aging population with fewer children. It's a world where where people mostly live in cities in very small flats; where the kitchen is also the living room and work space; where food, especially meat, is scarce; and where recycling is strongly encouraged, even enforced. It's also one where most people work from home, groceries are delivered immediately on demand and where computers are ubiquitous, yet almost invisible.

How accurate these assumptions are isn't important in this context, because they still act as a springboard for new ideas that could prove useful whatever the circumstances. However, there's as much social engineering as kitchen engineering here, as the Concept Kitchen 2025 urges the occupant toward accepting a drastically reduced, green lifestyle.